Books: Sayles'sWinning Way in Short Stories

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers.

About the Archive

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

IT doesn't really require the 15 stories in John Sayles's collection to prove that Mr. Sayles has a winning way with the short story. In fact, any number of passages could be extracted from his two novels, “Pride of the Bimbos” and “Union Dues,” to prove the point. The youngsters’ choose‐up baseball game in a scruffy field, the black rural church service and the Reverend Orison's (wonderful name) sermon in “Pride of the Bimbos,” and the ideological discussions in “Union Dues” are passages so rounded, shaped and satisfying that they could easily stand alone, though they are organically related to the works in which they appear.

Conversely, the six stories centering on Brian McNeil in the present collection, if put between covers of a book, would make a substantial novella, and not only in bulk. For in their sequence, these tales constitute a rite of passage from the boy's adolescent fumbling with sex through his Western odyssey and arrival on the Coast, where the ominous portents of his future cast their shadows over him.

The collection also illustrates the author's approach to his material. A strong determinist strain runs through his work. The first part of his second novel, “Union Dues,” could easily, one imagines, have been written by the naturalistic Frank Norris. And one of the short stories, “Tan,” about a help. less Vietnamese girl buffeted by a bestial fate, has the spareness and inexorable quality one associates with the writing of Stephen Crane.

Mr. Sayles's characters are end products of their environment. The heroic element is muted in his fiction. Most of the time, his people are acted upon. They do not so much suffer through life as endure it. But the harder they are hit, the less malleable they become. They become fixed, stolid, uncommunicative. That is why, in his fiction, the settings often have a richness that his people lack.

As a character, Brian McNeil is not fully defined, but the settings of his adventures are rich, detailed, memorable: the kennels and dogs he looks after in the first story; the rundown ranch where the stallions are gelded, and that final setting — the small‐town square on the Pacific where the majesty of the ocean contrasts with the life of the men who live at the edge of it.

Mr. Sayles is saved from the pessimistic bias of naturalism by a lyric language, a feel for the fantastic, best seen in “Pride of the Bimbos,” and a sometimes hilarious sense of parody. Those ideological discussions in “Union Dues” are too good to be true. There is no Barth‐like verbal prestidigitation, no cleverness or archness of a Donald Barthelme either.

Even at its most fantastic, there is a realistic underpinning to Mr. Sayles's fiction. A presupposed reality is considered the mark of reactionary esthetics, but that is to assume that everything has been said about the situations and characters Mr. Sayles writes about: miners, Chicanos, broken‐down ball players, divorced and pathetically unanchored women, men who take their pleasure where they find it and run, and young people who feel the prison doors of life closing in on them before they know what life is. Rarified stages of consciousness or the extremes of sensibility are not the only stuff of fiction.

Besides the McNeil stories, “The Anarchists’ Convention” contains the much anthologized “I‐80 Nebraska, M.490‐M.250,” another version of the open road, which gets better with each reading; the droll “Schiffman's Ape,” in which a couple of academic animal watchers turn out to be better subjects than the animals they are ostensibly there to observe; the ironic “Old Spanish Days,” in which a handful of Mexican immigrants enjoy the uneasy benefits of American life as they celebrate a holiday with the men who supplanted them. “Children of the Silver Screen” is a faultless vignette, capturing the afternoon of a nondescript motion‐picture house just before it turns to porno films. It is almost as if the author was fixing a moment in history.

The title story may not rank with “I‐80 Nebraska” in scope, but I can see that it might exert a similar hold on the affections of the reader. A group of oldline anarchists come together at a banquet in what seems like a last stand. Old resentments flare, old loves rekindle, old tactics are dissected once again. Even as they wield knife and fork, factions rise, until the hotel — in a single hostile act — unites all of them against the common aggressor: the hotel management. Gallant and pathetic, even ludicrous, they are nevertheless, in Mr. Sayles's hands, something more than figures of fun.